Token Error

[Trial_Master]

Last night my Beyonwiz T4 and T2 Ice TV clients started requesting my password. I went to check your forums but your entire domain appeared offline. When it was working again I rebooted both boxes but they both still requested Ice TV passwords. I left things as were and headed to bed. This morning they were both still requesting password? So I rebooted both again but made no difference. Logs show token missing password required.

I entered password on both devices and they logged in and starting syncing straight away.

I know it's early morning but I was curious if Ice were intending to email their user base that they would need to enter their password again. My concern would be if I had been away for a period I would be blissfully unaware nothing was taping once the current timers were exhausted.

[grampus]

My input probably not very useful
But my experience last night was that apart from requesting my Ice password once on one of my boxes, the whole thing went downhill from there.
Both my BW boxes lost contact with the ice server.
At the time no amount of rebooting or re configuring my wifi connect helped.
I was unable to connect to any Ice service, forum, IceTV guide from PC, Ipad.
So the assumption was that Ice had a major conniption.

Had another look early this morning, and all was as normal.

[MD]

Hi everyone,

Yes we had a server outage last night which has caused some red eyes this morning (!) but all is OK now except that if any new recordings were set after 9:50am will need to be reset.

[MD]

...to clarify 9:50am yesterday (Saturday).

[prl]

Yes, I had an IceTV error popup last night, too. 502 Bad Gateway, IIRC, though there were reports on the Beyonwiz forum of other error types. The exact error you got may depend on exactly when your device tried to contact IceTV.

I got one error popup, none on subsequent fetches from the server, so I guess by then it was working again.

[IanL-S]

Very odd; one of my T2 and the U4 were displaying the login; the other T2s were not.

Apparently only impacts on some types of PVRs; no indication of issues with my Toppys.

Ian

[prl]

Very odd; one of my T2 and the U4 were displaying the login; the other T2s were not.

I think that if the PVRs tried to connect at certain times last night, they got "401 Unauthorised" errors (our in-use T4's log shows it getting this error response). If that happens, the IceTV plugin discards its IceTV authentication token (it was refused access with it, so there's probably not much choice).

Once that was done, it needed to successfully connect with the IceTV server, and in order to do that, it needed IceTV to generate a new token, which requires a password. Only your email address and authentication token are stored on the PVR, not the password.

Apparently only impacts on some types of PVRs; no indication of issues with my Toppys.

My guess is that it would only impact PVRs that tried to connect at the relevant times last night, and then only if they use this authentication method. I think that Topfields (and the old Beyonwiz DP series) use the old server API, and the newer T/U/V series Beyonwizes use the new API. That may explain why the Topfields were un affected and also why some Beyonwizes were unaffected.

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

Within 5 minutes of the database issues we took the entire server offline to attempt to mitigate people getting a 401, then when the restore was complete we brought the server online and for 99%  of people it would just keep working.

The bigger problem is a quirk off the Amazon RDS restore page which ended up with the restore happening from 9:50 am instead of 9:50 pm as intended. This would also mean that people that logged in and created a token during the day yesterday would also need to log back in after the servers were brought online.

The token issue would only affect Beyonwiz T/U/V series PVR's and Humax 2tune's (except the 2tune's don't ask for the password they just log back in), older Beyonwiz's and all other PVR's don't use the new API and still use username and password for all requests so would not be affected by this either.

I have been fixing what I can today, and it looks like the majority of affected PVR's have settled down now.

[csutak40]

Well, at least on my T4, it asked me to provide my password, but wouldn't accept it.  When I realised that your server was down, I thought I'd just wait until it came back up again.
However, when I checked later, when you were back on line, I realised that it still wasn't connecting to IceTV, still needed to enter my password to fix that
The only comment I would make that  it would be nice to be notified by you if this happens, because if I happened to be away from home, it would have stopped uploading timers until I got home to discover that I need to re-enter my password

[prl]

The reason that the IceTV plugin on your Beyonwiz kept asking for a password is that it connected to IceTV at a time when the IceTV server was telling the plugin that the plugin was providing incorrect authentication information.

That meant that the plugin cleared its authentication information (it had been told it was invalid) and asked for a password so that it could generate new authentication information.

It turns out that the authentication information was not in fact invalid, but there was no way  that the plugin could have known that.

That's why some people whose Beyonwizes didn't contact the IceTV servers at the time it was denying access because of "invalid" authentication information didn't need to re-enter a password - their authentication information didn't get cleared.